Ng'arua Maarifa Centre was established by ALIN, to be used by the rural communities to access; free internet, E-government services, multimedia content, online market information, publications and library, advisory services and ICT trainings.

Pages

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Let us enlist the Paris climate deal to build resilience

By Maarten van Aalst

As world leaders convened
in New York on Friday to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change, the key
question on everyone’s mind was: How will this unprecedented global commitment
translate into action on the ground?

A core ingredient for the
success of the Paris Agreement was, in fact, that a big show of concrete action
led the way for the world leaders - action not just by national
governments or U.N. institutions, but by companies, civil society organisations,
mayors and local government, youth groups, farmers - you name it. With the
Paris Agreement now on its way to full implementation, we should focus on
taking those actions to scale.

Which brings me to the
second key ingredient of the success of Paris: the vital balance between
ambitious mitigation on the one hand; and support for the building of
resilience on the other, especially for the world’s most vulnerable people.

The risk does still exist
that this balance may be lost as we start to implement the Paris Agreement,
through the already-huge (and growing) concentration on the transition to
renewable energy. Paris sent a strong signal on this to markets and private
investors, and the world is now adding more capacity for renewable
power each year than coal, natural gas and oil combined.

Where is the equivalent
commitment to resilience? It’s there in theory, with a very strong mandate, not
just in the Paris Agreement but also across the new Sustainable Development
Goals, as well as last year’s Sendai agreement on disaster risk reduction and
next month’s World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul.

But how are we really
following up on those commitments?

ROOT CAUSES OF RISK

Adaptation finance is
increasing, albeit slowly. Investments in climate services are on the rise, and
initiatives like the IFRC’s One Billion Coalition for Resilience, the UK-funded
programme Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters
(BRACED), Partners for
Resilience, the Global Resilience Partnership and others are aiming to link
together work at different levels by various actors.

We are starting to
address the root causes of rising risks and the lack of accountability for how
we manage them, becoming gradually more reluctant to accept ‘natural disasters’
as natural events we could not have predicted.

But we are nowhere near
balancing resilience with mitigation - we are simply not scaling up fast enough
to keep up with the rising challenges.

The secret is not just
channeling more global climate finance into adaptation, but also getting local
information about risk and how to build resilience integrated into development
and official planning across all sectors, and into the screening of major new
investments.

We are seeing some exciting
examples, but it’s now up to us to leverage Paris to take these to scale. We
really don’t have a choice. Politically, failing to step up to both sides
of the overall commitment — mitigation and resilience — would endanger the
credibility of the entire global climate deal.

More importantly, it
would also mean we’d fail to address the massive climate impacts already
unfolding, with increasingly serious implications for our lives and economies
in the coming years and decades, regardless of how much we reduce greenhouse
gases.

So let’s make sure we
take bold action to live up to the Paris ambitions - not just by transforming
energy markets but also by building resilience, especially for the most
vulnerable. As Ban Ki-moon said at the Paris deal signing ceremony: “All hands
on deck, from the local to the global.”

Maarten van Aalst is
director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. He was at U.N.
Headquarters in New York for Friday’s signing ceremony.

Welcome Message

You are on the Ngarua Maarifa Centre's Blog. This is a community based I.C.T hub, that gives the communities of Ng'arua a platform to express themselves. And share their Knowledge and experiences with the rest of the world.